The New Yorker in the ’30’s when it was known as The Astor.
In 1976, with The Original 99 Cent Roxy still pulling in crowds in the east end, Gary Topp and partner Jeff Silverman opened The New Yorker Theatre, on the Yonge Street Strip, fifty yards south of where the indie underground cinema CineCity once stood.
The pinball parlour Funland was across street, and on the next block south ...
The opening shot of the title sequence for our film The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a photo of an empty movie theatre, The Allenby, opened in 1936. It would become The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre (just 243 steps from the Greenwood subway station!) in 1972, run by Gary Topp. As Stephen Perry of the radio show Equalizing X Distort (on the University of Toronto’s radio ...
Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.”
The Dadaists in the 1920’s turned the artworld on its head by doing stuff like turning urinals on their end and calling it Art.
The Velvet Underground 1966; John Cale in the foreground.
“And there would go the secret plot, the piss had missed the hole in the pot, like that ancient teenage dream, from soul to poisoned soul to poisoned soul,” so sang John Cale post ...
Today we talked with one half of Rough Trade, guitarist/writer Kevan Staples. Kevan is one of many from the punk/new-wave scene in Toronto who ended up with careers in film and TV, currently a partner at Toronto post-sound house Rhythm Division, and composing scores for films and TV series. In April we catch up with the Auntie Diva herself, Carole Pope. (Yea, yea, yea, we know — Rough Trade weren’t ...
An absolutely rollicking week at Pogo H.Q.:
We topped off last week by chatting with fangirl Erika Larner, who’s lineage goes from Gary Topp’s Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre, where many seeds of punkish suberversion were planted, to the Ontario College of Art when it was directed by avante-garde administrator Roy Ascott to helping and hanging out with OCA-based bands like The Cads, and Oh Those Pants, and selling beer at ...
The B-movie Caged Heat was shown often at Gary Topp’s The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre in Toronto in the mid-seventies. Written and directed by Jonathon Demme, with an original score by John Cale. Demme would go on to direct (among many films), The Talking Heads‘ concert film Stop Making Sense.
John Cale would play the New Yorker (Gary Topp‘s new venue) theatre in February of 1977, fanning the flames that ...
Xenia at The Last Pogo 30th Anniversary Bash in 2008; photo Edie Steiner
The Last Pogo Jumps Again co-director Kire Paputts interviewed ex-B-Girl Xenia last week, and discovered that besides somehow still looking nowhere near her real age, she’s a Yoga instructor, and maybe that’s a clue. Over the next few weeks we’ll be chatting with original Diode and Johnny & The G-Rays drummer Bent Rasmussen, back in town after some ...
A phrase that could mean different things for different people (and I mean you!) Suffice to say, here at Pogo H.Q. we’re ramping up all of our work on The Last Pogo Jumps Again, and hope to picture lock this winter, and then go through the grueling post-production phase and get this sucker out there in 2010.
While co-director Brunton makes his yearly pilgrimage to Indian Head, Saskatchewan, directing and editing ...
Gary Topp at NXNE 2008. Photo by Albert Lee
The first public screening of The Last Pogo in 28 years closed out the 2008 NXNE Festival in Toronto to a rowdy sell-out crowd. Pogo director Brunton introduced members of the audience who were in bands that played the Last Pogo concert in 1978: Andy Meyers, Ken Badger and Mark Perkell of The Scenics; ...
The Last Pogo Jumps Again studies the evolution of Toronto from small town to big city and it’s pop/counter-culture lifestyle during the early and mid-70s. It centers around the first wave of Toronto punk rock and new-wave music, from the Ramones playing the New Yorker Theatre in ’76 through the police shutting down Teenage Head and causing a riot at the Horseshoe Tavern’s infamous “The Last Pogo” concert in December 1978.
